Guiding Principle

My guiding principle when teaching, telling a story, speaking with others, or well, anything is pretty simple:
People can tell the difference between real and fake.
The world is, let’s face it, a pretty dark place, filled with hypocritical self serving motives, that we largely mask and pretend are not true. That is why I think shows like Black Mirror are such a success, they drop from the sunshiny niceness of the world and expose something ugly, something that feels real.
But honestly, I don’t think being all dark is real either, there couldn’t even be a subversion of goodness if we had no sense of what that goodness is. Delusion, especially self-delusion, is a pretty hardwired part of human nature. Humans can be horribly selfish creatures. It can be especially hard to be sensitive, and it can be hard to live a real life.
But it is possible, and the world, really, when you look at it, is filled with beauty, even if you have only ever experienced such beauty in fictional settings. If you don’t see others being heroic, righteous, kind, you can still choose to try to be that way yourself.
Being in the modern world means you are tempted with shortcuts that lead towards self destruction and isolation. But it also means that for most of us, you can do what you think is right, you can be yourself, without the threat of starvation.  We are no longer stuck in small, impoverished villages, totally at the mercy of those around us, which can mean we can more easily isolate ourselves, but it also means we are, for the first time in a very long time, capable of truly living human lives.
I will leave with one of my favorite phrases with regards to the debate: Are humans good or evil?
The worst things one can say about humans are true, but so are the best.